Although timetabling has long been studied through constraint satisfaction based techniques, along with many alternatives, only recently work has been reported where distributed timetabling problems (DisTTPs) was studied as distributed constraint satisfaction problems (DisCSPs). We present an alternative method for solving DisTTPs based on multiply sectioned constraint networks (MSCNs). The pro...

The examination timetabling problem has been extensively studied since Carter produced a collection of real instances [1] (for a recent survey see [2]). This year, a significant extension to the set of realistic instances has been provided by the examination timetabling track [3] of the 2007 International Timetabling Competition2. The exam track instances are much more realistic than the Carter...

An earlier Case-based Reasoning (CBR) approach developed by the authors for educational course timetabling problems employed structured cases to represent the complex relationships between courses. The retrieval searches for structurally similar cases in the case base. In this paper, the approach is further developed to solve a wider range of problems. We also attempt to retrieve those cases th...

We consider the Train Timetabling Problem (TTP) in a railway node (i.e. a set of stations in an urban area interconnected by tracks), which calls for determining the best schedule for a given set of trains during a given time horizon, while satisfying several track operational constraints. In particular, we consider the context of a highly congested railway node in which different Train Operato...

Train scheduling is one of the significant issues in the railway industry in recent years since it has an important role in efficacy of railway infrastructure. In this paper, the timetabling problem of a multiple tracked railway network is discussed. More specifically, a general model is presented here in which a set of operational and safety requirements is considered. The model handles the tr...

Finding robust yet efficient solutions to optimization problems is a major practical issue that received large attention in recent years. Starting with stochastic programming, many of the approaches to robustness lead to a significant change in the problem formulation with respect to the non-robust (nominal) case. Besides requiring a much larger computational effort, this often results into maj...

The process of gathering enough experimental statistical data over a set of instances of the Course timetabling problem (CTTP) could take a lot of time to an interested researcher. There exist several parallel computing models capable to accelerating the execution process of metaheuristic algorithms. This paper explores the idea to use a parallel model in a metaheuristic algorithm over the Cour...

We consider an academic timetabling and rostering problem involving periodic retraining of large numbers of employees at an Australian electricity distributor. This problem is different from traditional high-school and university timetabling problems studied in the literature in several aspects. We propose a three-stage heuristic consisting of timetable generation, timetable improvement, and tr...

Timetabling problems are often hard and time­consuming to solve. Most of the methods of solving them concern only one problem instance or class. This paper describes a universal method for solving large, highly constrained timetabling problems from different domains. The solution is based on evolutionary algorithm’s framework and employs tabu search to speed up the solution finding...

This paper describes the application of a hybrid genetic algorithm to a real-world instance of the university course timetabling problem. We address the timetabling of laboratory exercises in a highly constrained environment, for which a formal definition is given. Solution representation technique appropriate to the problem is defined, along with associated genetic operators and a local search...